Sociological Horror in GET OUT (2017) and THE BELKO EXPERIMENT (2017): Why the comedian's horror movie is scarier and the horror auteur's comedy isn't as funny

2017 has seen the release of two major films which use the template of a horror movie to make a satirical point grounded in 21st-century America: Get Out about racism, The Belko Experiment about corporatization. Both are essentially about modern slavery: self-dehumanization in service of a power that sees itself as greater. Get Out, directed by comic actor/writer Jordan Peele, is insightful and stinging. The Belko Experiment, written by Guardians of the Galaxy director and onetime Troma filmmaker James Gunn, is bloodier but less biting. Though the two films essentially share a target--well-meaning, privileged white people whose good spirit easily wears dangerously thin--only Peele's film hits it most of the time, while Gunn's leans too heavily on the nihilism in its premise.



In 20 years or so, Get Out will be taught in schools as a snapshot of what racism meant in the early 2000s, represented not by whips and chains but by grins and handshakes. It's in every little iota of tacit bigotry faced by Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) in the early moments of the film: being asked by the police for his I.D. when he wasn't driving, repeatedly being affirmed that Obama is "the best President of my lifetime," being greeted with "My man!" When his (white) girlfriend Rose Armitage (Alison Williams) brings him home to meet her parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), they greet him warmly. Genial. Smiling. Welcoming.

But something is off, and Peele masterfully tilts the movie's balance just enough to signal it. The Armitages' estate resembles a plantation, just a little bit. Their housemaid (Betty Gabriel) and gardener (Marcus Henderson) are both Black. Dean explains their presence to Chris but also doesn't explain it. Rose's brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) is all too eager to talk about sports.

As the film progresses, Peele builds each microaggression into an atmosphere that is more and more threatening, and when the plot reveals itself (there will be no spoiler here), he has presented a scarily convincing picture of what such seemingly innocuous infractions can add up to. It is oppression disguised as admiration, consumption and assimilation disguised as diversity and unity. A party scene in which Chris meets the Armitages' friends is a cavalcade of every condescending statement an unthinking white person has ever made to a Black person. When the reason for their statements becomes clear, the insidiousness of the "well-meaning" behavior is revealed as well, and becomes all the more terrifying.

Kaluuya brilliantly captures the arc of a character who gradually progresses from grudging tolerance to true terror. Williams finds the right note of unproductive protectiveness, exemplified in an early scene where she thinks she is defending Chris from a traffic cop but may be making things worse. Whitford effortlessly plays friendly and threatening at the same time; look at how he appears to confront Chris about racial concerns, seeking to defuse them rather than answer them. Keener, quiet at first, plays her cards steadily until Missy has Chris exactly where she wants him. (For a similarly horrifying Keener slow-burn performance, check out 2007's An American Crime, a true story about a girl who's held captive in a friend's basement. Whitford also appears, as a much more genuine character.)

The film is all but stolen by two supporting performers. Lakeith Stanfield is unforgettable as the first character seen in the movie, and about his reappearance the less said is the better. As a friend of Chris's, LilRel Howery gives a comic performance that is relieving but not distracting (and may singlehandedly redeem the TSA in the public eye).



Though it's dealt with less overtly, racism is an issue in The Belko Experiment as well, implied in the corporate system that it targets. It is not for nothing that the characters who emerge as the villains are white middleaged men, while many of the unfortunate victims are Latino. It does not have to follow that the white man is always the villain (indeed, the emerging hero of the movie is also white and male), but when desperation sets in, the white men are likeliest to assume that the power gravitates to them.

It's why Tony Goldwyn and John C. McGinley make such effective villains. They're exceptional at playing as if they think they're the good guys. Goldwyn is Barry Norris, the manager of about 80 people at the Bogotá branch of the Belko company, which "facilitates employment of Americans abroad," or something similar that's boring enough to forget immediately, reminiscent of unnecessary middleman companies like Enron. Barry is ex-Special Forces, but seems to specialize in management doublespeak.

Early scenes in the film are effective in their take on the corporate atmosphere, playing like an extension of Office Space. Cheerful conversations between employees are benign and contentless. Viciousness lurks just beneath the veneer of banality, especially in McGinley's Wendell Dukes, a serial sexual harasser who masks his lechery with an ingratiating smile. It's the same smile McGinley memorably wore when he played Bob #1, the easily bamboozled consultant in Office Space. Or maybe he was Bob #2. I don't remember.

When the instigating action of the film occurs, director Greg McLean lets it play out believably, as the characters move from incredulity to realization. A calm, robotic voice suddenly comes over a PA system of which the employees were previously unaware, ordering them to kill two people immediately. If they don't, a small explosive implanted in the back of everyone's head (ostensibly a tracking device) will be detonated in four people.

McLean and Gunn do a fine job of believably stripping away the boredom of the average work day until it dawns on the characters that there actually is a threat. Once the threat is confirmed, Goldwyn naturally assumes that the leadership role will naturally fall to him, naturally. The possibility of committing murder is cleverly substituted with "considering our options." Soon the self-appointed oligarchs are determining who lives and who dies, while resident do-gooder Mike (John Gallagher, Jr., slumming it here after his frightening turn in Hush and complex supporting role in 10 Cloverfield Lane) insists that no one has the right to decide who lives and who dies.

It's an intriguing setup, one that's recognizable to anyone familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment. The fact that real-life (though less head-explodey) psychological trickery has yielded well-known disturbing results does not work in Belko's favor; by comparison, it seems cartoonish. Not content to mine their situation for real tension, McLean and Gunn fall too easily into violence and gruesomeness. By the end the film is a nihilistic exercise not unlike the lesser Saw sequels, with the well-worn horror film lesson that humanity is corrupt and there is no saving anybody.

That's a shame, because Gunn knows how to create interesting characters before the movie wastes them. He introduces two strong Latina women (Adria Arjona and Melonie Diaz) only to dismiss them carelessly. I really liked the two maintenance men, played by Michael Rooker and David Dastmalchian, whose friendship seems tenderer than that of usual co-workers. Rooker, gentler than usual, treats his younger colleague as a son or younger brother, which makes one's untimely demise (I won't say which) an effectively tragic moment.

Still, the movie can't help but sacrifice its more subtle pleasures for unpleasantness. I offer a challenge to the makers of the inevitable Belko II:

1) Fewer people. 80 is too many. We know there'll only be one standing at the end, and dispatching 79 people in less than 90 minutes is difficult. Start with 6 people and whittle them down one by one instead of by the score.

2) Only one person's head explodes, at the beginning. The rest of the tension should come from the threat of the bombs going off.

3) The last survivor should be nonwhite or a woman or both.

Both Belko and Get Out are relatively limited in scope, with their share of social commentary embedded in a simple terror scenario. But only Peele's film spins its fable subtly and surehandedly, while McLean's grows more hamfisted as it goes along. McLean, whose Wolf Creek has a good share of fans (I am not one), has an indubitable talent and will make a great horror film one day. Peele already has.

Get Out: **** out of ****

The Belko Experiment: ** 1/2 out of **** 

SHUT IN (2016)

A variation on Wait Until Dark in which all the characters appear to have undergone lobotomies, Shut In manages a colossal waste of considerable acting talent in a very short (though painfully long) running time. With better writing, it could have been a triumphant return to form for Naomi Watts, who was brilliant in Mulholland Drive and even in Children of the Corn IV, and who might have soared in this kind of role. The movie’s second lead, Charlie Heaton, is fresh off a star-making turn on Netflix’s “Stranger Things.” Featured is Jacob Tremblay, so heartwrenching as the young Jack in Room. And then there's Oliver Platt, one of the quirkiest character actors there is.

These top actors wander through the film like unfortunate Beckett characters who know they must go, but cannot. They're hamstrung by a screenplay that never ventures beyond the bounds of the expected. As good an actress as Watts is, she never convinces us her character is dumb enough to stay locked in a closet when deadly forces (the nature of which, like a good film citizen, I will not reveal) pursue her in her own house. As good an actor as Platt is, he never convinces us he's dumb enough to try to rescue her himself before the police arrive. Assuming that Shut In takes place in a world where The Shining exists, he should think, "I know what happened to Scatman Crothers. I'll wait for some backup."

Mary Portman (Watts) is a child psychologist who has been caring for her catatonic stepson Stephen (Heaton) for six months since an accident left him completely paralyzed. Suddenly she begins to suspect a presence in her house that might be threatening her and the defenseless Stephen. It may have something to do with the deaf patient of hers (Tremblay) who has recently gone missing. With an ice storm coming, she finds herself trapped in her house with Stephen, and possibly with something malevolent.

I won't reveal anything more, not because I don't want to spoil the surprise but because the movie leaves me with nothing else to reveal, really. There's essentially only one more piece to the puzzle, and it's so thuddingly obvious that I kept expecting screenwriter Christina Hodson to have one more rug to pull out. Surely this can't be the climactic twist, I thought. It is. Compare it to M. Night Shyamalan's twist near the end of The Visit, in which the reveal was a genuine surprise, built naturally from what came before it, and framed the climactic third act grippingly. In Shut In the surprise is revealed only because the movie is almost over, and gives no explanation for the odd behavior of certain characters early in the film.

Shut In is reminiscent of The House at the End of the Street, another slapped-together thriller hinged on an underwhelming twist and wielding a lead actress it doesn't deserve (Jennifer Lawrence). It is not as dumb as that movie, but it is almost as dumb, which is dumb enough. Ouija: Origin of Evil, still in theaters, has a sillier name but is a much more inventive and fun thriller. Those looking for a good scare should seek that film instead.

1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 1: 10 RILLINGTON PLACE (1971)

It's odd that 10 Rillington Place, a true-crime thriller that is bloodless but no less brutal than any of its type, isn't widely celebrated alongside Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Night of the Hunter as one of the best portrayals of an honest sociopath on screen. The sociopath, played by a calm, soothing Richard Attenborough, is an ordinary man of extraordinary cruelty named John Christie, who has every appearance of a being a kind and helpful neighbor. What Christie did to his neighbors, Tim and Beryl Evans, is so terrible that it's considered one of Britain's most horrific crimes.

Tim (John Hurt) is a not-so-intelligent working class man who barely makes enough money to support his wife Beryl (Judy Geeson, bright and unsuspecting) and their newborn daughter. When Tim and Beryl learn that they have another baby on the way, Tim enlists the help of Christie, who pretends to have medical experience, to perform an illegal abortion.

What follows is historical record. Christie murdered Beryl during the operation and convinced Tim to help him hide the body. Christie later returned and murdered their baby. Tim was convicted of the murder of his wife and executed. Later the truth was found after Christie killed four more women, including his wife. Tim's conviction was overturned posthumously, and the death penalty was abolished in Britain.

The movie follows the events with disturbing earnestness. Much of the dialogue is taken from the record itself. A scene in which Tim confesses a phony story to the police, coached by Christie, is starkly real and heartbreaking, and recited by Hurt with a rehearsed manner combined with an irrepressible tremor. There is no actor more apt at portraying inner pain than Hurt; it's why he was so believable as the alien popped from his stomach.

The director, Richard Fleischer, takes a documentary-style approach. Scenes are shot straightforwardly; the horror is allowed to linger without relief. Fleischer's prolific and resume is made up mostly of family and adventure films--The Vikings, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Doctor Dolittle, Fantastic Voyage--but amid his high-profile fare are a select few particularly taut thrillers. (He also directed The Boston Strangler, a similarly-toned procedural which is an overlooked prototype of Zodiac.)

This movie was cited as a footnote in Attenborough's career after his death a couple of years ago. It ought to have been more. Attenborough is famous for playing gentle, morally conflicted characters in films like The Great Escape, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, and Jurassic Park, and here that same gentility masks a real, true-life monster.

*** 1/2 out of ****

This Week in Cinemasochism: Kirk Cameron's SAVING CHRISTMAS (2014)

I thought I had this movie pegged.  The poster said it all, I figured: the evangelical former teen idol Kirk Cameron at the center, in a Chuck Norris-like pose, wielding a candy cane like a sword and protecting a snow globe as if it were the baby Jesus himself.  The tagline, "Put Christ back in Christmas," suggests a full-on acceptance of our declaration of War on Christmas, and that Kirk will be there to meet us on the front lines.  Watch out, liberals and atheists, 'cuz evangelicals are coming to kick your ass!

I embarked upon this 80-minute film ready to get served a lesson in the True Meaning of Christmas.  But then the movie dug into its plot, and... well, I was humbled to find that I wasn't in the movie's crosshair at all.  It isn't even a straw-man attack on secularism so that evangelical audiences can cheer on the defeat of those who would insist on "Happy Holidays" in every store.  Though there's lip service paid to the "wet blankets" who don't want Christians to celebrate "too loudly," Cameron surprisingly aims to the right rather than to the left.  It's targeted at people who think Christmas needs to be more pure, more religious, more centered on Jesus.  Kirk positions himself as the liberal reformer, who's here to tell those stiffly stiffersons to lighten up: that all the decorating, singing, celebrating, gift-buying, and ho-ho-ho-ing is perfectly okay!

After a five-minute introduction featuring Cameron himself sitting in front of a Christmas tree musing about what Christmas means to him and sipping from what I'm pretty sure is an empty cup of cocoa, we go to a lavish Christmas party hosted by Kirk's sister (played by his real life sister--Bridgette, not Candace).  Kirk learns from his sister (she's billed only as Kirk's sister) that her husband, Christian White (the symbolism here is about as subtle as a brick), has been struggling with Christmas lately.

Rather than join in the celebration, Christian (played by the film's co-writer/director, Darren Doane) has elected to sit in his car and stew.  Kirk goes out to sit with him to try to bring him out of his Scrooge attitude.  Christian explains that he can't shake his skepticism about Christmas.  How does our celebration of Christmas represent the Christian faith at all?  Wouldn't the more Christian thing be to take all the money we spend on presents and trees and decorations and use it to feed poor children?

A question that leads even the most liberal among us to think: well, yeah, wouldn't it be?  Nah, I guess not, and the prospect of all those starving kids doesn't seem to bother Kirk a lot, since he listens to Christian's fairly legitimate quibbles with an unending smug grin, as if he's just waiting to deliver him a yuletide smackdown.

He never really answers the question about the poor children.  Instead, Kirk deters the conversation to an absolutely befuddling thesis on Jesus's swaddling clothes in the manger, the relevance of which I'm still attempting to grasp.

It's around this point that we realize that the entire movie is going to be made up of Kirk and this guy sitting in a car talking.  Kirk essentially runs through every element of Christmas celebration that has a pagan or secular origin and explains that, see, it's Christian after all.  The Christmas tree hearkens back not to the winter solstice but to the tree of knowledge from Genesis.  The act of material gift giving isn't materialistic at all; it's a representation of God's spirit being made material in the form of Jesus, get it?  And most ridiculously at all, the shape of the presents under the tree really seems to resemble the cityscape of Bethlehem!

Cameron, Doane, and crew must have realized soon into production that their car conversation wasn't enough to sustain a feature film, as most of the actors seem to have been directed to milk every beat for as long as they can.  The movie's barely an hour long if you take out Kirk's long introduction and the interminable final dance number, followed by a "credit cookie" outtake sequence that, if it isn't  hilarious, is at least loose and goofy enough to show that the movie was made by human beings and not robots.

There's little plot to speak of, though the monotony of Cameron's feature-length lecture is broken up slightly by the appearance of two Happenin' Black Dudes who occasionally converse about being restricted from celebrating Christmas.  It culminates in one of them delivering an off-the-cuff beat poem presenting a litany of conspiracy theories; it's here, I think, that the filmmakers mean to downplay the whole "War on Christmas" thing as kinda silly, which is commendable, though if you listen closely, the dialogue seems to equate fears of the Koch Brothers and Citizens United with 9/11 truthers and chem trail watchers.

The movie isn't completely unwatchable; it appears to have been made with a modicum of production value.  Cameron has a completely vapid screen presence, though Doane has a certain lumpy charm as the Scrooge character.  And though the movie is patently offensive, both logically and religiously, it is effective as a crass curiosity: here is, from the country's most prominent right-wing straight-arrow devout Christian, a defense of tacky materialism in the name of Jesus.  It's okay to get gaudy on Christmas; it's a little disingenuous to say the Bible told you to.

* out of ****

P.S. I didn't mention the "Game of Thrones"-style Santa Claus fight scene.  It's not as much fun as it sounds.

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #4: PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2 (2015)

I haven't seen the original Paul Blart: Mall Cop, though the hugely successful film has its defenders, even among critics.  Roger Ebert awarded it three stars and praised it for being "a slapstick comedy with a hero who is a nice guy," and extols star Kevin James as a combination of Jackie Gleason and Nathan Lane.

He's not wrong.  Kevin James is without a doubt a powerful comic presence and his character, Paul Blart, is certainly a nice guy.  But in the case of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, it's the movie around him that's nasty and mean-spirited.  No one in his or her right mind would wish the happenings in this movie on a person as genuine as Paul Blart.  Considering that James created the character and wrote both films alongside Nick Bakay, it looks like he's as much to blame for the movie's failure as he is for its few successes.

This sequel continues an unmistakable mean streak in the oeuvre of Adam Sandler, its producer.  Like Grown Ups 2, it's a celebration of almost caveman-like masculinity, at the expense of anything that deviates from the normative.  It's a shame, because in the slapstick scenes James makes Paul Blart into a meek, overweight Chaplin-type shlub who might have been a formidable comic hero if the movie were as sensitive as he is.

As I've said, Paul Blart is a nice guy.  That doesn't mean he's likable.  He's the kind of guy who waves to you from his front porch every morning when you get the paper, after which you nod and hurry inside before he tries to talk to you.  He's the type who's a little too talkative when he catches you arriving home from work, and doesn't take the visual cues as you slowly back away toward your front door.

It's Paul Blart's niceness that makes us pity him rather than sympathize with him, and it doesn't help that the movie is downright awful to him from moment one.  The first five minutes, honestly, had me gobsmacked.  After a brief recap of the events of the first film, it's revealed that Paul Blart's love interest (Jayma Mays) left him after six days of marriage.  It's okay, he thinks: he still has his daughter (Raini Rodriguez) and his mother (Shirley Knight).  Then his mother is hit by a milk truck.  It's one of those CGI-created "funny" hit-by-car scenes that's for some reason become common in comedies nowadays (Mean Girls, the Scary Movie films, etc.), in which everything seems perfectly pleasant and ho boy!  There goes a truck or a bus or something big.

It is inconceivable that anyone, particularly someone who's been in the business of comedy as long as James has, would think it was okay to begin any comedy this way, never mind a big-studio mainstream family-oriented PG-rated one.  I wonder if audiences were indeed rolling in the aisles as they watched Shirley Knight get bowled over.  I wonder if they're the same people who laughed as Donald Trump mocked the disabled reporter who questioned him.

As soon as Mrs. Blart is run over by the truck, the movie is dead.  No movie can recover from such a disastrous misstep.  The last 90 minutes of the movie could have been the entirety of Horse Feathers and it still would have been awful.

So when Paul Blart goes to Las Vegas to attend a security convention at which he's convinced he will be the keynote speaker, there isn't much reason to care.  His mother's death admittedly isn't written for entirely crass reasons; it's meant to lend a desperation to the character, as he becomes overly protective of his daughter Maya, who is afraid to tell him she wants to go to UCLA rather than New Jersey Community College.  While they're in Vegas, Maya stumbles upon an art heist and is kidnapped, and it's up to Paul to save her.

The bad guy, a slithery, well-dressed Wall Street type named Vincent, is played by Neal McDonough with such straight-faced dedication that he ends up delivering most of the movie's real laughs.  McDonough is one of the best conventional baddies out there, and this movie suggests he's due for a Christopher Walken-like second career as a comic foil.  Other than two no-good-very-bad scenes--one in which he conveniently blurts out the fact that he has an allergy to oatmeal, so that a character can rub some oatmeal in his face later to defeat him, and another in which he and Blart trade a series of silly lines about how crazy they both are--McDonough's performance is flawlessly smug.

Nespa?

Some of the movie's slapstick works.  I found myself laughing at a scene in which Blart is completely unable to incapacitate a villain with a stungun.  A scene in which he fights a giant peacock seems right out of nowhere, but works on a surreal level because of a completely deadpan performance from a nearby lounge pianist who witnesses the whole thing.

When the movie is in slapstick mode, it's considerably easier to take than when it attempts to be a comedy of manners.  The script is generally unkind to women, even beyond Blart's patriarchal attitude toward Maya.  When one woman (Jackie Sandler, Adam's wife) rebuffs the advances of a very drunk security officer (Nicholas Turturro), she is of course painted as a judgmental shrew.  The character who's set up as Blart's love interest, hotel manager Divina (Daniella Alonso), shows absolutely no interest in him nor any chemistry with him, but the movie dictates that she has to fall in love with him anyway... and then, when he turns her down, the movie dictates again that she needs to fall for the head of hotel security (Eduardo Verastegui).

As bad as Paul Blart: Mall Cop is, I'm interested in checking out the first film to see if it does the character right.  I can imagine a good movie being made around Paul Blart, if it's kind-spirited and knows how to treat him.  This isn't it.

* 1/2 out of ****

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bombs #1, 2, and 3: The Neil Breen Trilogy - DOUBLE DOWN (2005), I AM HERE....NOW (2009), and FATEFUL FINDINGS (2013)

To be mentioned in the same breath as Tommy Wiseau is probably not a crowning achievement if you're an aspiring auteur, as writer-director-producer-actor-composer-editor-costumer-caterer Neil Breen clearly is.  But seeing as his Fateful Findings is attracting the same kind of midnight-showing attention that The Room once commanded, that is Breen's destiny.

I don't know quite how he feels about that notoriety, but it is beyond his help.  He shares with Tommy Wiseau a totally earnest commitment to his ideas, as well as a complete and utter blindness to his own dearth of talent.



But make no mistake: Neil Breen has something to say and he's going to say it, even if he has to write, direct, act, and cater it himself. Fateful Findings is the work of a man who's trying to make the Great American Movie.  What's it about?  It's about everything.  Life.  Friendship.  Romance.  Danger.  Politics.  Corruption.  Addiction.  Mental health.  The Constitution.  Mysticism.  Ghosts.  And Neil Breen is the only one who understands them all.

Oops, I meant "Dylan." Breen plays Dylan, our hero, a bestselling author/computer scientist extraordinaire/extremely handsome man of action and mystery.  He heroically shrugs off calls from his publisher for a new book, turning his focus instead to hacking into "secret government and corporate secrets" (his words).  But someone in the government isn't too happy with what he's been finding...

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.  The movie begins with Dylan being hit by a car (in an effect which is, considering the number of clumsy hit-by-car sequences that make their way into much more professional movies these days, not bad).  As he recovers in the hospital, he finds he's being visited by spirits, and may have been given special abilities...

Wait, I'm still getting ahead of the movie.  We meet Dylan as a child as he's frolicking through the forest with his best friend Leah.  They find a magic box hidden under a mushroom, with magic stones inside.  Leah moves away and a voice-over narration tells us that Dylan never sees her again... until she turns out to be his doctor after he's hit by the car.

If that made up the entirety of the movie's plot, it would be busy enough.  But Breen endeavors to make a film made up entirely of tangentially related sub-plots.  I haven't even mentioned the neighbors with the troubled sex life, their daughter who has a crush on Dylan, Dylan's wife and her pill addiction, or the two psychoanalysts who somehow play into Dylan's mystical quest.  All of the plots exist mostly to glorify Breen, who gives himself not one but two attractive love interests, and writes himself plenty of makeout scenes with both.

Virtually none of the plot threads are resolved, nor are they meant to be.  The only conclusive moment of the film comes in a third-act press conference, in front of a green-screen image of what might be the Supreme Court, in which Dylan announces to an invisible but very audibly cheering crowd that he's, indeed, been hacking into governments and corporations all over the world, and what has he found?  Greed, corruption, deception, etc.  Breen isn't even interested in telling us what kind of corruption he's found.  He simply cuts to a montage of reactions from four or five representatives of the corporate world, and what they do next is something I will leave for you to experience.  I have to admit, I was floored.

Fateful Findings is a rare bad movie that I'd recommend to everyone, not just masochists like myself.  It's truly captivating in its loopiness, and if Breen doesn't wear any of his hats particularly well--he's less a jack than a two-of-all-trades--he stacks enough themes on top of one another so that the film is never boring.  It's no surprise that he makes up most of the creative crew for the film; no one, upon seeing this script, would have agreed to collaborate with him on this.


If Breen's two previous films represent the same paranoid, self-aggrandizing vision, they unfortunately don't have the same gonzo energy.  In his debut, Double Down, he casts himself as Aaron Brand, a notorious computer hacker (Breen himself is an architect, and I can picture him delivering a Peter Cook-style monologue called "I would have rather been a hacker than an architect") who lives in the desert near Las Vegas because the government is trying to kill him.  They've already assassinated his girlfriend: a sniper takes her out while she and Aaron are both naked by his pool (with nudity awkwardly obscured).  He's visited by her spirit occasionally, so he can tell her things like "Thank you for loving me."

Double Down is, unfortunately, the most focused and professional-looking of the three.  Breen is also the superhero of this film, and the fact that Aaron Brand is essentially a domestic terrorist who threatens 9/11-style attacks on Las Vegas several times poses the question of whether Breen means for him to be an antihero, or he didn't think much about those implications.  I'd vote the latter, especially since Aaron seems to have hints of the same spiritual power that Dylan has in Fateful Findings.  If Double Down is generally more restrained than that film is, Breen restricts himself much less as an actor; while in Findings he has to remain stoic and mild-tempered, here he allows himself some wonderfully unhinged moments in which he runs through the desert screaming.


Seeing as Breen has viewed himself as infallible so far, it's only fitting that in his second film, I Am Here....Now (4-period ellipsis his), he literally plays God.  Clad in white robes, He returns to earth, looks at what man has made of it, and states clearly early in the film that he is "disappointed" in our "speechies," as he puts it.  We've ruined the planet and allowed corporations to buy our government.  Breen-God walks around Las Vegas helping the needy and meting out some Old Testament-style punishment to the wicked.

On the surface, this is an interesting premise, but overall I Am Here....Now is probably the nadir of Breen's not-exactly-illustrious three-film career.  Even though Breen has a history of writing himself into romantic relationships with seemingly much younger women (even while playing God), I Am Here....Now is the only film that reveals a truly nasty misogynist streak, in a sub-plot that follows a woman who is laid off from an unspecified job at a green energy company and has no choice but to become a hooker.  I know, I know--he's making a point about how corporations have the power to make or break us, yadda yadda yadda--but it's hard to imagine it playing this way if it were a male character.

The scenes which are meant to depict the horrors of gang violence are just as culturally illiterate.  Breen's idea of a gang culture is a bunch of dudes hanging around a condemned building, most of them carrying machine guns openly, occasionally punching each other in the face or shooting each other for no real reason.  A scene in which a character's hand is cut off, meant to be disturbing, is not far removed from Evil Dead 2.

Breen's lack of talent for storytelling is evident through all three films, since he elects mostly to dictate it to us rather than show it.  He never shows us what he's hacking into; he merely tells us about it (and then hurls some laptops around his office).  He can't show us the type of corruption being committed by corporatists; he has to have them muse at length about their crimes.  An example:

Businessman #1: "Now that we've paid off our fellow elected representatives in the legislature, that environmental solar panel development bill will fail next week."

Businessman #2: "Not to mention the cash it'll put in our pockets."

Of the three, only Fateful Findings avoids falling prey to the tell-don't-show method, and that's only because the plot is so ridiculous that it defies any explanation.

Still, Breen is an auteur.  His films all have a clear through-line about corporate greed and environmental stewardship, as well as the reawakening of adolescent romance (I'm guessing Breen had a childhood sweetheart he never reconnected with).  Strange motifs reappear with justification known only to Breen.  For instance, scenes in each film feature characters lying face down with their arms above their heads; it looks just weird enough to have been done on purpose.  As a matter of fact, that's a good summation of most of Breen's work: just weird enough to have been done on purpose.

WE HARDLY KNEW 'THEE: The Films of Alan Smithee, Part 1: HELLRAISER:BLOODLINE (1996)

When a director wants to escape his or her own movie, Alan Smithee is there to open the hatch. 

Hellraiser: Bloodline, the fourth in the series, was the first Smithee film I ever watched, when I was a teenager. Having been an avid Fangoria reader, I knew about the film's troubled production, and was an admirer of the actual director, Kevin Yagher. Yagher was a top-of-the-line animatronics and puppetry effects creator, most famous for designing the Cryptkeeper and directing the opening and closing segments of "Tales from the Crypt."

The film was taken out of his hands during production, and the script by Peter Atkins (who'd been on board the series since part II) was heavily rewritten. Whole subplots, like one featuring Kenneth Tobey of The Thing from Another World, we're dropped. Joe Chappelle, whose name was already mud among horror fans for ruining Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, was brought in to fill in the gaps. (To be fair, Chappelle has done some good things since, having directed many episodes of "Fringe" as well as the enjoyable Phantoms, in which Lawrence of Arabia teams up with Ray Donovan and the director of Argo to fight an ancient subterranean life form.)

So what's left of Hellraiser: Bloodline is a mess, but, upon recent rewatch, I was surprised to find it an entirely watchable mess. The plot is incoherent, as are the philosophical ramblings of the villainous Pinhead (Doug Bradley), who sounds like H.P. Lovecraft would if he were high at a Phish concert. But it's quickly paced and occasionally inventive in its sadism. 

We begin in space. Yep, in space.  Aboard the space station Minos, Dr. John Merchant (Bruce Ramsay) opens a puzzle box which fans of the series will find familiar.  The crew wonders what he's up to.  Explaining that he is attempting to destroy a demon, he tells the story of the construction of the puzzle box, from the distant past to the relative present and then back to the future, where the demon Pinhead is confronted.

Thanks likely to postproduction tinkering, the story structure is awkward, beginning in the 22nd century, flashing back to the 18th century, to the future again, to the 1990s, and then again to the 22nd century for the finale.  It doesn't help that the dull Ramsay appears as the protagonist in all three settings; he has the demeanor of a kinder, gentler Billy Zane, but fails to conjure any character or personality to go along with the demonic torture.

The film also shows little evidence of the talent of Adam Scott, who reportedly enjoyed working on the film but betrays none of that enjoyment on the screen.  As an 18th-century gentleman who (thinks he) enslaves a demonic princess (Valentina Vargas), the future Mr. Leslie Knope exists for a few dull scenes before he makes an inauspicious exit, though not before proudly displaying one of the Laughable Haircuts of Film History.

Not even hell on earth will stop the Catalina Wine Mixer.

The film hops on to a present-day architect (also Ramsay) who unwittingly designs a building-sized replica of the puzzle box that could be the pathway for all manner of demons. It's here that Pinhead makes his first appearance, threatening the architect's wife (the underused Kim Myers, of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and young son (Courtland Mead, best known as the really irritating Danny from Stephen King's miniseries of The Shining). 

Though the film is by no means a cohesive piece of anything, it's probably the best of the Hellraiser sequels so far, if we don't count Scott Derrickson's surprisingly decent Hellraiser: Inferno, which is barely related to the series at all. Bloodline's underlying pretentiousness elevates it above your usual run-of-the-mill sequel hackery. The finished product is a total disaster, but it's clear that somebody at some point had high expectations for this movie. You don't see the kind of high-minded philosophizing that spews from Pinhead's mouth in a Friday the 13th movie. 

** out of ****